I remember having a dream one night about being at some kind of ministry training seminar or something in China of all places (I’ve never been there), and during it, our teacher told us, “You all know your Bibles well, but are you living it?”
He then started to teach about mercy, and he quoted from the passage where Jesus said, “Go and learn what this means. I desire mercy, not sacrifice.” (Matthew 9:13)
At that point, I woke up kind of wondering what it all meant.
I was on vacation at the time, and that night, I visited my brother’s church. As I was waiting for service to start, I was reading over those passages on mercy.
Then when the message started, my brother (an assistant pastor) read from James, after which he started teaching on, of all things, mercy.
Later that week, I visited my home church and my pastor spoke about…mercy.
Which kind of gave me the idea that God wanted me to learn something. And that year, God started to teach me about mercy.
It’s a lesson I’m still learning. I wish I could say I am now a completely merciful person, but I’m not. It’s an area I still need to grow in.
Jesus says here,
Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy.
What does it mean to be merciful? One thing I learned that year was to stop putting people on a measuring stick. To constantly demand that they meet the standards of my expectations.
God gave me that lesson one day while teaching English to some Japanese students.
I was getting really frustrated with some of them because of their lack of improvement. I was feeling like, “You should know this already! You learned this! Why can’t you remember?”
But God told me, “Bruce stop putting them on the measuring stick you’re setting up. Yes, they probably should be at a higher level than they are. Yes, they should probably know this by now.
But they don’t. Stop criticizing them and accept them where they are. Look at what their needs are and do what you can to meet them.”
It was a lesson I never have forgotten. So many times, people don’t meet our expectations as friends, as coworkers, as children, as husbands, and as wives. As a result we become very critical of them.
But to be merciful means to stop criticizing and to instead start asking ourselves, “What is their need? How can I meet their need?”
That was a key difference between Jesus and the Pharisees, and you see it throughout the gospels.
Another meaning of being merciful is to forgive. People often don’t deserve our forgiveness. Some aren’t even sorry for the hurt they cause us. And because of that, resentment and bitterness start to build up in our hearts.
The word resent, means “to feel again.” And when we hold resentment in our heart, whenever we think of that person that hurt us, we “feel again” the pain they caused us.
Resentment and bitterness chains us to our past. And God doesn’t want that for us. He wants us to move on and find the purposes for which he created us. But we can’t do that if we keep holding on to our past.
More importantly than that, God showed mercy to us, even though we didn’t deserve it. And because of that, he calls us to show mercy to others and forgive them even when they don’t deserve it.
And Jesus tells us time and again that if we desire mercy from God, we need to be merciful to others. We see that in this passage, in the prayer he taught his disciples, and also in the parables he taught.
How about you? How merciful are you?
Moment to Moment (Bible blog) 